Stretching, I yawned, but only lightly. We healed faster, and as I got older, I started sleeping less too. Four hours were as good as eight to me. Less downtime, double the assassinations—Jericho had Walmart beat hands down for sales efficiency. I hadn’t told Stefan yet about the change in my sleep patterns. I wanted to be as normal as possible in his eyes and with all the other genetic baggage I had, that was not easy. I got out the chair, showered, fed Godzilla, Gamera, and Mothra, and was waiting for Stefan in the kitchen with breakfast and a stack of pictures I’d printed off my computer.
He stopped in the doorway, which was also freshly painted—the mobster who’d traded his gun in for a paintbrush, or had switched hands with them anyway. Paint with the right, keep a weapon in your left. He didn’t look much better than yesterday, especially with the addition of dark stubble that his scar ran through like a road to nowhere. “You cooked?” He rubbed the sleep crust from his eyes and took another look. “And it’s healthy. That can’t be good.”
Cheese omelet with butter-fried potatoes, sausage, toast, coffee, and orange juice. Compared to my usual chocolate chip pancakes or cinnamon-banana waffles, it was healthy. He sat down and started digging in, every fork stroke a testament to massively overacted resignation. “I’m rebuilding the garage, you know,” he mumbled around a mouthful of food. “Poison ivy. Splinters. You couldn’t have waited until winter to blow it up? When all the poison ivy, oak, and whatever else was dead?”
“You are such a drama queen,” I said drily.
His eyebrows shot up and he almost choked on his eggs. “Sara at the coffee shop taught me that one,” I explained. “It seems to fit.”
“Glad you’re picking up all the slang, but cut me some slack and at least give me drama king.” He put down the fork and reached for the coffee. “Go on, spill. Let’s get whatever it is out of the way. What could be worse than the garage, because I have houses to paint and you have tourists to not piss off today.”
“Eat first,” I ordered. He wouldn’t feel like eating after, not for a while.
“Misha . . .”
“Eat.” I folded my arms.
“Michael, I’m serious.”
I looked up at the ceiling. There were cracks there. Three formed a completely perfect equilateral triangle. I’d measured it one day just to be sure. If there was a God, the bipolar one who was wrathful and vengeful in the Old Testament and raining fluffy kittens of love in the New Testament, it wouldn’t be in the sky or the sea or the inexplicable saving of a life. It would be in a perfect, equal-sided triangle. God would be the universe; the universe is physics; physics is science. Therefore God would be science. I wondered if I could cut it out of the ceiling and sell it on eBay. People did that with tortillas all the time and you couldn’t measure the Madonna, Mother of God. I had proof. Surely that would get me a higher price.
“Fine. Jesus. You are such a brat,” he grumbled. I lowered my gaze and narrowed my eyes. “Okay, okay.” He threw up his hands. “You’ve got me. You’re not a brat; you’re not a kid; you’re an adult. And one who pushes me around as if I were a toy car and half the time I don’t realize it.” He snorted and started finishing off the breakfast.
“I am the puppet master,” I said with appropriate darkness and doom in my voice. It should’ve been a joke, but unfortunately it was appropriate in real life this morning as well.
“You’re Darth Vader without the asthma and black cape,” he countered, scraping up the last forkful of potatoes.
“That too.” I didn’t mind. I liked Darth before he became a whiny mama’s boy. The whole choking people without having to touch them hit a little close to home, but it was a big pop culture thing I’d missed at the Institute and it was entertaining. I had all the Star Wars movies—the good three and the blasphemy-against-nature three. I’d watched the first three at least twice each. At least I’d stopped before I bought a light-saber to hide in the closet, although I still firmly stood behind the view that Han had shot first. The man wasn’t an idiot. Of course he shot first. I’d been younger then, by two years, and I had missed the excitement of everything being new and engaging. Things had popped up now that were new, but not engaging.
Not in a good way at least.
Stefan got up, dumped his empty plate into the sink, and said, “Okay, you’ve made sure I’m fed and watered just like your little monsters, so tell already.”
Tell I did. As he braced his hands on the back of my chair and looked down over my shoulder, I brought out the pictures I’d had hidden under my plate and laid them out. “I went back to look at the news on Anatoly.” I didn’t wait for a reaction, rushing on. “I thought something had seemed peculiar.”
“Weird,” Stefan substituted absently. He tried to help me get the language right for someone my age and my pretense of a lifelong coffeehouse career ambition.
“Weird. Something seemed weird.” I pointed at each photo. “This man. He’s in every one of them. Where they found Anatoly, when they put him into the coroner’s van, at the autopsy.” Stefan knew better than to ask where I’d gotten the autopsy photos. I could tell you who killed JFK if you wanted to know, but you really didn’t.
“I was curious,” I said. “There’s nothing Anatoly can do for the FBI or IRS now, but he looks like government. Then I ran him through my facial recognition program.”
That one did get to him. “You have a facial recognition program? You’ve got to be shitting me. Like the government and the TSA?”
“No, nothing like theirs. Mine is ninety-nine point nine percent accurate. They wish they had my program.” I pointed at the last picture. “This is him coming through the Miami airport the day after you broke into the Institute, grabbed me, and they moved. I hacked into the rental car place he used—video cameras are everywhere in airports—it’s great—found the car he rented under his own name, which definitely makes him government. Overconfident. I downloaded that car’s GPS information and guess where he went.”
Stefan didn’t have to guess. There was only one place that would have me going to this much trouble. He had gone to the Institute. “Who is he? Who is the son of a bitch?”
“Hugo Raynor. He’s been with the CIA, NSA, and now Homeland Security. He’s forty-two, five foot ten, best marksman at the Farm.” This was where CIA applicants trained when they were young and relatively untarnished. Raynor was far beyond the Farm and as blackened with tarnish as fifty-year-old tin. I’d bet he was still a good marksman, though. You’re never that good at something unless you love it, and if you love it, you don’t give it up.
“He speaks five languages,” I continued, “amateur” running through my mind, “and repeated a course in advanced psychological and physical interrogation. He got the top score both times. I guess it was like a good book; once isn’t enough.” I leaned back in the chair and said what had to be said, although Stefan probably already knew it by now. “The mob would’ve been quicker with Anatoly. The autopsy report says what was done to him was slow. Someone wanted to know something. The mob wants to find you too. King Anatoly is dead. . . . Long live King Stefan.” The man who’d taken Anatoly’s place in the mob would want to make sure Stefan wasn’t coming back to stir up old loyalties. “But they’re not patient, not like this.”
“Raynor. Goddamn it.” He sat back down. “We knew the Institute had to have some sort of government contact to get away with what they did, but that he tracked down Anatoly when even I couldn’t have.” He shook his head. “That makes him one dangerous son of a bitch. Pack your shit. We’re going. If this bastard is involved with the Institute, and he obviously is, what he wanted from Anatoly is you. Anatoly didn’t know where we are, but it’s too close. This mother-fucker is too close.” He stood. “Go on. Get your stuff. You know the drill. Hell, you wrote the drill because mine wasn’t efficient enough. Fifteen minutes and we’re in the car. Go.”
I had mildly tweaked the drill, but that wasn’t the point. He was right, but . . . I didn’t want to leave. Th
is was home. The first I’d had. “But—”
“Fifteen minutes,” he said, cutting me off, “and I toss you and your smelly, evil pets in the trunk of the car and drive until dark. If you don’t want to live in those clothes for the next week, I suggest you start packing. Don’t bother with the pictures of Raynor. Keep one; I’ll take care of the rest.” True to his word, fifteen minutes later, Stefan did take care of the rest.
He burned down the house.
Burning down the house had not been in my emergency drill. It should’ve been as it was the most efficient way of eliminating evidence and wayward genetic material such as hair or skin particles. I turned to watch out the back window as the Bumble—as my home—burned a cheerful red-orange against the green of the trees. Stefan had already called 911. They would get there in time for the house to burn to the ground but not for the fire to spread, which was good. I’d turned Mothra loose. He’d pecked me on the head and flown to freedom, wing as good as new. Gamera I’d put in the woods where he crawled off with a speed twice that of when I’d found him and eyes bright and open to the world. He was still old; he’d die sooner or later, but now it would be later.
You do what you can to make up for what you’ve done in the past.
We followed the bend in the road and there was only smoke to see then, a black fist hanging in the gray sky. No more rusty water out of creaking taps. No more raccoons squabbling in the attic every night. No more crickets or fireflies, the smell of free coffee from work soaking the air every day, no more wall of shelf after sagging shelf that held close to five hundred of my movies and old TV shows. Bottom line. . . .
No more home.
And no more “Harry,” the friendly but not overly friendly in a pedophile kind of way handyman. Harry was gone and while Stefan was always himself when Harry was officially out of sight of the townspeople and off duty, now Stefan was back all the way and then some, full-time. Almost three years had done a lot for me. I’d learned more things than I’d imagined existed; I’d developed social skills—of a sort; I became whole. Not normal, but as whole as I could hope to be, and that was good enough for right now.
That same amount of time had done something for Stefan too. I’d progressed and he’d regressed, but that wasn’t a bad thing for him. He’d lost some of the guilt he’d been drowning in. When I remembered Stefan first coming for me, it wasn’t a man in a black mask or a crazy guy shoving Three Musketeers bars at me as he tried to convince me that I was his brother. I remembered an ocean, dark as a universe without stars—black with guilt, despair, rage, violence, self-loathing. All I could see was his hand reaching out of the water; the rest of him was buried in a liquid Hell he couldn’t escape.
All of Jericho’s children could see, because we’d all been trained to look. I’d seen every one of Stefan’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities—I’d seen him as a target long before I’d seen him as a person.
But the past years had taken his hand and pulled him up, pulled him out. He hadn’t been on the shore, but he’d been in the breakers, close to being free. If he laughed, he meant it. If he was happy or at least content, he didn’t have to fake it. Now he had to step farther back into the water, if only for the violence. I watched the smoke disappear behind us, because I didn’t want to watch Stefan. He was a good man and when good men have to do bad things, that ocean will never let them go.
Be kind to Stefan, Anatoly whispered . . . because life hadn’t been.
“Where’s Raynor now?”
I didn’t turn, the road unspooling behind—the same road to nowhere as Stefan’s scar. “Gone. He lives in Washington, D.C., a house, so I was able to get into the utility companies there and take a look. His electricity and water use has been pretty much nil for the past two weeks, which means he left one light on and has a dripping faucet. I used Google Earth and his car is parked in the driveway, no airline has his name for that time, so either he had a nasty bathroom accident, statistics rank those very high on the scale, or he bought another car—a used one, with cash, because it hasn’t been registered yet.”
“He’s smart. Fuck.”
“I know. I think he might be as smart as me.” I did turn this time, offended as they came at the notion. No, offended as . . . hell. Right. Offended as hell. “Do you think that’s actually possible?”
“That he might know you’re keeping an eye on your back trail to see if he might come following? Yeah, I think he’s that smart. But as smart as you? Come on. Where’s that ego I know and put up with?” He shoved my shoulder with one hand. “Although the earplugs really help with that last part.”
We’d passed through town—there wasn’t much to pass through; blink and it was gone—and we were headed for the Bridge of the Heavens. Kicked out of Paradise and I didn’t even like apples that much.
Didn’t that suck?
The plan called for driving through Washington, crossing the border into Canada and then we would keep going until we were lost in Banff National Park. Our fake IDs would pass border patrol; I knew that. I’d made them, but camping in the wilds of Canada wasn’t going to help me continue my research to help save the rest of Jericho’s children, all of them—to take away their power to kill. Saul had found their location two years ago and I’d been working on a way to fix them since then. I hadn’t needed to be fixed. I didn’t like to kill, but I knew the same wasn’t true of all the rest. Some might be like me—it was a possibility—but some loved to kill. Where we were going there wasn’t even the most hideous of creations—dial-up—much less WiFi. I’d never be able to continue talking with Ariel about my fake “paper,” about the cure. And I needed to keep in contact with her—even if that was my business and no one else’s at the moment. Maybe “suck” wasn’t a strong enough word for this. “Bites”? “Blows”? “Sucks balls”?
I had to get a dictionary for these sorts of situations.
“Holy shit!” Stefan spat, and slammed on the brakes.
I automatically braced myself with one hand on the dashboard and with the other tossed Godzilla into the backseat. He hissed and I felt him crawl under my seat. He’d been through this type of thing before. He had his own drill plan.
As we three-sixtied off the road onto the grass and dirt side, I saw an unfamiliar car and an annoyingly familiar face through our windshield. The tourist—Mitchell, the sheriff had called him—was sitting on the hood of a car, gape-mouthed with a half-eaten sand-wich dropping from his hand.
There is no such thing as coincidence in the known universe. This blobby ass didn’t come close to the failing end of that grading curve. If nothing else, it was nice to know that stress improved my cursing abilities.
Stefan was out of the car with a fistful of the guy’s shirt and slamming him repeatedly into the windshield of the man’s car before I managed to get my seat belt unbuckled and get out myself. I was quicker, stronger, had trained for this for all of my life that I could remember, but Stefan hadn’t only been trained. He’d lived it in the Mafiya every day, and that made him better than me. I wasn’t envious of his skills. I was only sorry it had turned out that way.
“What are you doing here, asshole?” Stefan snarled, and banged him against the glass again, this time cracking it. It formed a spiderweb pattern around Mitchell. He was a tourist—a fake tourist—caught in a web of violence and rage that I didn’t think he’d escape. “When I give people the kind of beating I gave you, they don’t tend to stick around. They damn sure don’t park by one of the two ways out of town and eat goddamn sandwiches. Who are you?”
Suddenly, the hand that had held the sandwich now held a gun, the dazed and stupid eyes sharpened, and what had seemed like fat now looked like something much more solid. The muzzle of the gun didn’t have far to go to end up jammed under Stefan’s chin to blow a hole through it, his brain, and out the top of his skull. Stefan stiffened before falling on the grass and road, a spray of blood and brain matter fanning the pale worn asphalt widely behind him. Eyes, neither brother brown nor agg
ressive amber, instead mirrored the gray of the sky.
Life changes just that fast.
People . . . they die faster.
And your desire to live can change from fierce to absent in that instant.
But that wasn’t what happened.
It was what I saw in a split second of dark imagination, a calculation of the odds, the preparation for every possible outcome, and the Institute-honed, razor-sharp logic of predator prediction. We all had it, inherent, and were trained to see the deadliest of potentials on top of that, but Stefan proved it wrong. The man’s gun was not far, but not far was too far. Harry used a paintbrush—his alter ego, Stefan, used a Steyr 9mm. A bullet from that could destroy a man’s heart as easily as I could. And it did.
“Shit.” Stefan stepped back from the body that sprawled on the hood of the car. He had blood on his shirt from the blowback of being so close when he’d pulled the trigger. “Shitshitshitshit.”
I echoed the sentiment mentally, because right then I was as verbal as a goddamn rock.
Hey, more cursing. Look at me.
I dropped onto the hood of our own car, which was slick—Stefan waxed it as if practicing to represent his country in waterproofing in the Olympics. It was slick enough that I slid and went down over the bumper without feeling it—wax, wax, wax—and hit the ground, which was considerate enough to be gritty and solid. No car fanatics had gotten it yet, and there I sat. I would’ve thought my mouth was hanging open like the dead guy’s, gaping in eternal surprise, but I tasted blood, so it was more likely that my teeth were buried in my lower lip.
It was the Institute all over again. The escape. The blood.
Once you thought you were out, they pulled you back in. Stefan should be saying that, though—it was from a mob movie.
Funny. Wasn’t I funny?